Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s new novel, All The Broken Things, is published by Random House. She is also the author of Perfecting, The Nettle Spinner, and Way Up. Kuitenbrouwer, who launches her novel January 20 at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto, will be guest editing The Afterword all this week.

I.

“It’s strange,” Kiki says, “when you publish a novel, and then you have to talk about it.” She can feel the anxiety roiling through her entire body, under her skin, electric. The only way to get it out, or try to get it out, is to talk, and talking is always fraught. It always sounds as if you were announcing something, it sounds like that to her now. She has a novel about to come out, and even though she’s busy writing the “next big blah blah blah,” the approaching publication date is making her squirrelly and difficult. Surely, someone won’t like it (and other neurotic thoughts along these lines).

“What is?” Gav says, flicking his phone open. “What’s strange?”

You see, she thinks, it’s like he doesn’t understand. She can’t believe this, can’t believe that he can’t practically see the ions bouncing off her. But she’ll explain it to him, slowly, in the hope he gets it before it feels humiliating. “It’s just that,” she says, “you write an early draft and it has all kinds of things in it—objects and characters and feeling—and then you edit it and edit it, and you sell it, if you are lucky (‘I am lucky,’ she adds), and then an editor, like a kidnapper you come to love, makes suggestions, and things get added but many things get taken away, effaced. It’s okay. It’s fine this happens, of course, because the end result is more fluid, and more—well, more what it needs to be. But there are always sacrifices.”

He is clicking through messages on his phone, now, or maybe playing a pirate game he has become obsessed about. He is handsome. He has a nice profile. A bit too stock photo, maybe, but nice.

“Are you even listening?” she says.

“Yes,” he says, looking up. “Yes!”

So, Kiki continues: “There are ghosts, in a sense, because for you the text is all the drafts it went through. For you, and only you, the text has these remnants of people, and failed scenes, in which there might be verdant geographies, and frantic lovemaking, and poignant, near-maudlin escapades. And for you, there is also the scrawl of red in the margin—your own scrawl, but also the scrawl of your various readers and editors— in which things like ‘Really?’ and ‘You’ve used the word numinous four times in ten pages—are you sure?’ and so the text is riddled with the incredulity of others and a hint of the despair you felt when you first read their comments. You worry about these things showing, and you worry you will mention by mistake in an interview a character who is no longer in the text—the old homeless lady with the doll you cut more than a year ago (she’s still so real to you)—and the interviewer will give you that look, the one that means you might be crazy.”

Gav is frowning at his phone. He says, “I thought you said the interviewers rarely read the book, anyway.”

“Yes, well there is that,” Kiki says.

Gav has put his phone down and is sitting there looking at her. He has on his tweed jacket, and those pharmacy-purchased reading glasses perched on his lovely aquiline nose. He hasn’t shaved and there is something about the grey in his beard that worries her—that trace of death reminding her of her own. He annoys her. She decides he has to go; she will have to edit him out. He is all wrong, anyway. A mash-up. He doesn’t ring entirely true.

“What is it?” Gav says, because he has seen her blinking at her own thought.

“Nothing.” Kiki shuts her eyes, and smiles, and when she opens them, he is gone.